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Twenty-​Ten

So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few inter­esting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm imper­man­ence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your con­sulta­tions:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an inter­esting year.

Prospects Now Appear So Bleak

More news to remind us of where we’re heading:

The pro­spects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough reg­u­la­tions on green­house gases are put in place.

Sci­ent­ists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen. That will allow them to be rein­tro­duced to the seas in the future if global tem­per­at­ures can be stabilised.

There Be Circles

News of unusual hap­pen­ings on the surface of Lake Baikal:

Late in April 2009, astro­nauts aboard the Inter­na­tional Space Station observed a strange circular area of thinned ice in the southern end of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. Siberia is remote and cold; ice cover can persist into June. The upper image, a detailed astro­naut pho­to­graph, shows a circle of thin ice (dark in color, with a diameter of about 4.4 kilo­meters); this is the focal point for ice break up in the very southern end of the lake. A sequence of MODIS images indic­ates that the feature was first visible on April 5, 2009.

Baikal con­tained another, very similar circle near the center of the lake above a sub­marine ridge that bisects the lake (ice circles are indic­ated by arrows in the lower MODIS image from April 20). Both circles are visible through April 20, 2009. Clouds cover the center of the lake until April 24, at which point the circular patch of thin ice was becoming a hole of open water. Similar circular ice patterns — although not nearly as distinct — have been doc­u­mented in the same central area of the lake in April 1994 (during the STS-​59 Shuttle mission) and in 1985 (during the STS-​51B Shuttle mission).

While the origin of the circles is unknown, the peculiar pattern suggests con­vec­tion (upwelling) in the lake’s water column. Ice cover changes rapidly at this time of year. Within a day, the ice can melt almost com­pletely and freeze again overnight. Throughout April, the circles are per­sistent: they appear when ice cover forms, and then dis­ap­pear as ice melts. The pattern and appear­ance suggest that the ice is quite thin. The features were last observed in MODIS images on April 27, 2009.

Below is the pho­to­graph taken by the astro­naut on the Inter­na­tional Space Station and a MODIS satel­lite image with the unex­plained circles (for what it’s worth, I think they’re caused by sub­merged UFOs that are attempting to start their anti-​matter drives) circled in red:

One of the strange circles that have appeared in the ice. (Source)

Sunken UFOs pre­paring to leave? (Source)

Dragonfly Wing Farm

This feels like the future:

Belgian firm Vincent Cal­le­baut Archi­tec­tures have designed a vertical farm based on the wings of a dragonfly. Located along the East River at the south edge of Rooselvelt Island [sic] in New York City the tower is a true living organism being self-​sufficient in water, energy and bio fer­til­izing. Spanning 132 floors and 600vertical meters, the dragonfly can accom­modate 28 dif­ferent agri­cul­tural fields for the pro­duc­tion of fruit, veget­ables, grains, meat and dairy.

That’s from an article on archi­Central, a very pretty blog.

(via grinding.be)

The End of Plenty

Last week PDN pub­lished an excel­lent and thought-​provoking pho­to­graphic essay about food. Def­in­itely worth a look.

(via Hugo Teixeira)

Time on the Radio

A month or so back I listened to an excel­lent edition of In Our Time about the physics of time. If the phrase “physics of time” doesn’t intrigue you, you probably won’t want to listen; but if it does, and you have time, the pro­gramme is well worth a listen.

Protect the Seeds

There is an inter­esting story on Time.com about the journey of “embryos of plant life” to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. According the Time, pho­to­grapher Caroline Poiron tracked the embryos from their “origin on a farm in Hyderabad, India” all the way to “the ‘doomsday’ repos­itory in Norway.” Wiki­pedia has some good back­ground on the Global Seed Vault project, if the essay piques your interest.

Seeing Numbers, Tasting Words

From Wiki­pedia:

Syn­es­thesia […] is a neur­o­lo­gic­ally based phe­nomenon in which stim­u­la­tion of one sensory or cog­nitive pathway leads to auto­matic, invol­un­tary exper­i­ences in a second sensory or cog­nitive pathway. People who report such exper­i­ences are known as synesthetes.

I’m always looking for more inform­a­tion on syn­aes­thetic exper­i­ences as its a phe­nomenon that seems very dif­fi­cult to effect­ively describe, or portray. A few weeks ago I saw a pretty good doc­u­mentary exploring the science behind the phe­nomenon (the tran­script is avail­able on the BBC’s Science website, but not the pro­gramme itself), but I watched it I was left wanting to know more, just as I had been left wanting to know more after I was first intro­duced to synath­aesia in sec­ondary school by Miss Porter, my Media Studies teacher. Let me know if you’ve come across any good books, doc­u­ment­aries, or articles.

Detoxification by Bacteria

Sci­ent­ists have recently dis­covered that pois­onous blooms of hydrogen sulphide off the coast of Namibia are being detox­i­fied (I prefer “eaten up”, but I’m not much of a sci­entist) by blooms of a sulphide-​oxidising bacteria closely related to Can­did­atus Ruthia mag­ni­fica, a bacteria found in mussels that live near the hot vents and cold seeps of the deep ocean. A bacteria that eats (sorry, detox­i­fies) a dan­gerous poison sounds like a good thing, to me, but it isn’t that straight­for­ward:

“There is a very positive as well as a worrying aspect of our dis­covery of a gigantic bac­terial bloom detox­i­fying hydrogen sulphide,” said Dr [Marcel] Kuypers. “Hydrogen sulphide is toxic to higher life and even at low con­cen­tra­tions it will instantly kill fish, oysters, shrimps and lobsters. The good news is that the dis­covered groups of bacteria seem to consume the hydrogen sulphide before it reaches the surface waters where fish are living. It is worrying news, however, that an area the size of the Irish Sea or the Wadden Sea was affected by sulph­idic bottom waters, without this being visible on satel­lite photos or detected at the mon­it­oring stations closer to the coast.”

Hydrogen sulphide has been respons­ible for mass extinc­tions, so it is indeed worrying that we don’t really have any idea of how much of it is cur­rently floating around in the deeper reaches of the ocean.

This is a satel­lite image of a bloom that wasn’t detoxified:

That photo came from the image gallery on the MODIS Rapid Response System website. There’s a lot more amazing satel­lite imagery on there, too, if you have time to browse; or if browsing is too much effort, grab the RSS of their Image of the Day. And don’t forget the bacteria that may be holding back the apocalypse.

(via Physorg.com)

Zee Evans

The pho­to­graph above was taken by Zee Evans at Palmer Station, the only U.S. research station north of the Ant­arctic Circle. I can’t find much inform­a­tion about Evans, but after a lot of Googling it seems she is a pho­to­grapher spe­cial­ising in Ant­arctic pho­to­graphy. I’d love to know more about her, and about how she came to do what she does, as Ant­arctic pho­to­graphy strikes me as being an idyllic spe­cial­isa­tion; but right now the internet isn’t throwing up anything useful.

I ori­gin­ally saw Evan’s pho­to­graph in an Antarctic-​themed post on The Big Picture, a blog “compiled semi-​regularly by Alan Taylor.” If you’re inter­ested in pho­to­graphy, The Big Picture is an essen­tial addition to your feed reader or bookmark folder or whatever thing you use to keep track of good things on the internet.

The Birth of a Nursery

This image was recently pub­lished on the ESO website:

Here is the press release that accom­panied it:

Illus­trating the power of submillimetre-​wavelength astro­nomy, [the above] APEX image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-​years across is causing the sur­rounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birth­places of new stars. Sub­mil­li­metre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the Universe, such as these cold, dense clouds. Continue reading…

Not Alien

A few weeks ago National Geo­graphic News pub­lished this video of a strange creature from the deep:

You can read more about it here.